The Case for Returning to Tumblr

Over the past couple of weeks, there’s been a weird, unhinged energy on Twitter. This is probably because it is slowly imploding, thanks to the actions of one chaotic billionaire. Elon Musk has fired swathes of crucial staff, gone back and forth on product launches and content moderation policies, and has plunged the company into unimaginable levels of debt. Brands have paused ad buys and, last week, Musk hinted at possible bankruptcy for the platform. All of which is to say: Twitter is a sinking ship and its users are scrambling for shards of wood to cling onto until the lifeboats arrive.

But what will those lifeboats look like? People keep pointing towards Mastodon, a decentralized social media network named after an extinct elephant, where tweets are called “toots.” Which is fine if you’re a nerd. Others keep sharing their Instagram handle in the hopes of migrating followers to the image-sharing platform. What I’m also seeing a lot of, though, are people dusting off their old Tumblr accounts and returning to the O.G. microblogging site. That’s right: the Tumblr comeback you’ve been hearing whispers about is finally happening. “We are cringe. But we are free,” they tweeted last week, to the sound of more than 300,000 likes.

To truly understand the impact of Tumblr, let us rewind for a moment. Before Tumblr launched in the late 2000s, social media was—for the most part—pretty ugly. Piczo and Bebo were awash with glittering pink text. MySpace was marginally better because it had profile songs and scene kids posting grainy selfies doing the claw, but it wasn’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, nor was it a conversation hub. When Tumblr came along in 2007, it managed to be both of those things. It was a digital blank canvas, where word and image could coexist seamlessly. In 2010, the platform was reaching around 1.5 billion page views a month. By 2011, that number had jumped to around 13 billion, far surpassing Twitter at the time.

Trying to describe the vibe of Golden Era Tumblr to those who weren’t immersed in it is difficult, in part because it was so sprawling. Lesbian fan fiction about Kristen Stewart lived beside film stills from The Virgin Suicides and GIFs of Effy Stonem from Skins smoking Marlboros in ripped fishnets. Screenshots from Studio Ghibli films sat next to paragraphs about critical race theory, beneath which teenagers argued.

While I was by no means a diehard Tumblr girl with loads of followers, I was still very much enamored with the platform. Where else could you learn about fourth-wave feminism before reblogging a random photo of a goth girl with zero context? I used to spend hours scrolling until 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., my eyes drying out, my mind filled with images of Winona Ryder and Sylvia Plath and soft butch genderqueer models from Paris. “It was genuinely cool,” said one friend, when I told her I was writing this piece. “But it wasn’t just about images, it was about words, too. That’s what made it pop. That’s what made it different.”

The Tumblr dream died as quickly as it was born. In 2013, Yahoo! Inc acquired Tumblr for an estimated 1.1 billion dollars, and in 2017, it introduced an opt-in Safe Mode, making it the default in 2018. These changes ultimately alienated massive amounts of Tumblr’s core audience. Gone were the NSFW illustrations, the fetish art, the queer erotica and whatever drew people to Tumblr to begin with. Sex workers left in their droves. LGBTQIA+ users ditched the platform too, after claims that some of their content was being shadowbanned for being too “mature.” I also logged off for good in the late 2010s. I was on Twitter by then, followed by Instagram. Tumblr just wasn’t fun anymore.

But that was years ago, and times have changed—drastically. With Twitter dying, the need for a slick, word-based platform has become more urgent than ever, especially for those in media, publishing, or fiction. And meanwhile, just last week, Tumblr announced that they were finally reversing its ban on nudity, writing: “We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form).” If ever there was a moment for a Tumblr renaissance, then it is now. Why migrate to a brand new platform when there is one right here waiting for us, that we’re already familiar with? Type “Tumblr” and “comeback” into Twitter, and you’ll see that it’s a question people have been asking themselves a lot lately.

Younger and perkier people will tell you that Twitter was for decomposing millennials anyway, and that you should just use TikTok now. But for those of us who don’t want to create upbeat, talk-to-the-camera video content, that isn’t very useful. There is a reason that people are still clinging to Twitter as their primary tool for communication—they want to make conversation and share their work, not scream Gnarls Barkley riffs into a cam with a ring-light or make bleary-eyed vids about being a stay-at-home trad wife to a slowed-down version of “Watermelon Sugar.” The TikTok kids are doing their own thing. But for writers, readers, and those more interested in aesthetics, a mass shift to Tumblr must have potential.

Obviously, the Tumblr of 2023 would presumably be nothing like the Tumblr of 10 years ago. Culture has largely moved on from the days of white girls posting pics of their dyed pink armpit hair or constantly reblogging monochrome GIFs that glorify disordered eating (I say “largely” because much of Tumblr’s toxic side has simply side-stepped to platforms like TikTok, and will probably always exist). Equally, the young people that populated Tumblr back in the day have since grown up. We’re not posting GIFs from Rihanna’s “We Found Love” video anymore. Our tastes have changed, the world has evolved. Nobody can go back in time.

But social media platforms can be whatever you want them to be. That’s all they are: a platform. Twitter could have become anything. It could have been a tool for good—and, in many instances, it definitely was. But it’s being decimated now. And there have to be other places to share ideas en masse, or form communities, or spread ideas. I never thought I’d say this, but: rise up Tumblr girlies, your time is now.

Daisy Jones is the author of All The Things She Said: Everything I Know About Modern Lesbian And Bi Culture